The 1980s were the era of clever supercomputing architechures. You had the onset of computed aided design of CPUs or boards; an individual, or small group, coul

The 1980s were the era of clever supercomputing architechures. You had the onset of computed aided design of CPUs or boards; an individual, or small group, could design an d build a supercomputer. PC or Workstation CPU chips were not yet powerful enough to dethrone mainframes or supercomputers. I was science grad student at Stanford that time. On a monthly basis it seemed some new supercomputer company would try to sell us their clever new machine in the million dollar range: supercomputing for the price of a departmental computer. But these super companies could only update their architectures every 3-5 years, whereas Intel was chugging out faster CPU every year or six months. It only took a decaded for a commodity cluster to beat a mini supercomter company in price-performance. Most these companies never made it to 3.0.